CSE Opens Fourth Season of Exhibitions with a Look at Robes as Art

The Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery at the College of Saint Elizabeth begins its fourth year of exhibitions with Robes, which reveals how artists use cloaks, robes, enveloping dresses and costumes to investigate the concepts of identity, symbolism, power, prestige, poverty, transformation, and metaphor associated with the notion of a covering for the body. The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, runs from Sept. 2 to Oct. 10, 2010. The gallery is located in the Annunciation Center on the CSE campus at 2 Convent Road, Morristown.

The exhibition features actual robes as well as paintings, prints, sculptures, collage works, photographs and DVD films in a variety of styles and materials by well-known and emerging artists. Works by artists such as Laura Cantor, Bronx, N.Y., Valerie Constantino, Tucson, Ariz., Adel Gorgy. Baldwin Harbor, N.Y., Susan Holford, Denville, JoAnna Johnson, Austin, Texas, Patricia Malarcher, Englewood, Maria Mijares, Plainfield, Nancy Ori, Berkeley Heights, Carl Rattner, New York, Babs Reingold, Bayonne, Nell Sonnemann and Rodney Thompson, Redding, Calif., are included.

The public is invited also to enjoy an evening of art and music on Wednesday, Sept. 15, beginning at 7:30 in the Dolan Performance Hall in Annunciation Center downstairs from the gallery, which will be open before and after the concert. The performance features the members of the CSE music faculty and some of their friends: John A. Kizzie; Kristine Oddsen Lamb and the Eclectic Consort; Jee Sun Lee, Suji Kim, and Sohyun Ahn. Vincent J. Rufino and Jarred Tafaro will play a variety of traditional and more contemporary music. The concert is free and open to the public.

The Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery, which opened in September 2007, is dedicated to presenting exhibitions that coordinate with the curricula and events on the CSE campus. Virginia Fabbri Butera, Ph.D., the gallery’s director and curator, has been curating art exhibitions for more than 30 years for museums and galleries such as the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. She has curated 16 exhibitions for the Maloney Art Gallery since it opened. Her areas of expertise are in 19th, 20th and 21st century American and European art.

The gallery is open, free of charge, to the public Tuesday through Thursday from 1 to 7 p.m. and Friday, Saturday and Monday from 1 to 5 p.m. It is closed Sundays, major holidays and college vacations. For more information about the gallery, visit maloneyartgallery.cse.edu.

Sponsored by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Elizabeth, Convent Station, New Jersey, the College of Saint Elizabeth enrolls more than 2,100 full- and part-time students in 25 undergraduate, 10 graduate and one doctoral degree programs. For information on other activities or programs, visit the College of Saint Elizabeth website at www.cse.edu.